“No mat­ter how col­or­ful you make it, con­tent will never be king in a wire­less world. It’s not the con­tent that mat­ters — it’s the con­tact” writes Dou­glas Rushkoff in his often-quoted arti­cle in The Fea­ture.

This state­ment rings true based on my expe­ri­ence in mobile mar­ket­ing and con­tent com­pa­nies. In fact, rel­e­vant, timely con­tent can lead to viral dis­tri­b­u­tion, which is about giv­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­nity for social inter­ac­tion (see “Social Cur­rency”). Unfor­tu­nately, many large mobile phone oper­a­tors and device man­u­fac­tur­ers do not develop the con­tact aspect enough and pre­fer to seek new con­tent (for instance, wide­spread con­sumer adop­tion of SMS came as a surprise).

This Feb­ru­ary I was kindly extended an invi­ta­tion to visit the 3GSM con­gress in Cannes by Oberthur Card Sys­tems. While there, I came across Elek­sen, a com­pany inno­vat­ing with fab­ric sen­sor tech­nol­ogy and was intrigued by their rol­lable tac­tile keyboard:

“Among our achieve­ments within this sec­tor are our Log­itech and Orange fab­ric key­boards; pro­vid­ing a full QWERTY key­board that can be rolled up when not in use, for peo­ple on the move. Our fab­ric key­board for the Log­itech M500 PDA range recently received the IDEA Busi­ness Week Gold Award for Inno­va­tion (2004).”

The pic­tured rol­lable fab­ric key­board for mobile devices makes it sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier and more con­ve­nient to work as well as to estab­lish con­tact with oth­ers
(for exam­ple, by mak­ing it eas­ier to write e-mails, sms or even to chat … no more sore thumbs from texting!).

Today, I came across  Philips-Polymer Vision’s paper-thin rol­lable screen, which looks like some­thing out of a science-fiction movie:

“In a world of pow­er­ful, ‘always con­nected’ wire­less devices, Poly­mer Vision’s goal is to pro­vide the lead­ing tech­nolo­gies for large dis­plays in small mobile devices. We’re enabling whole new design con­cepts in mobile prod­ucts, open­ing up rev­o­lu­tion­ary pos­si­bil­i­ties in form and flexibility.”

Besides being more pleas­ant to watch stream­ing video, images or text on a large screen, rol­lable dis­plays also make it eas­ier to share con­tent with oth­ers. For instance, the pic­ture below, from Poly­mer Vision’s site, shows two busi­ness peo­ple jointly view­ing the screen on a mobile device.

Today, this sit­u­a­tion might occur over a brochure, a lap­top screen or the small screen of a mobile phone. Rol­lable screens mul­ti­ply the types of infor­ma­tion that can be dis­played and cre­ate addi­tional, com­pelling oppor­tu­ni­ties for social interaction.

These inno­va­tions are com­pelling tech­nolo­gies in their own right and hope­fully mobile device man­u­fac­tur­ers will soon incor­po­rate them into new mod­els. Together, they are sure to enhance your effec­tive­ness not only in work­ing, but also in devel­op­ing busi­ness and social rela­tion­ships … in other words, your abil­ity to make and main­tain con­tact.